PHP Cert

psiebert

Anyone taken the PHP certification through zend? If so how hard was it?

mrploddy

psiebert wrote: »

Anyone taken the PHP certification through zend? If so how hard was it?

I've done this exam and passed on second attempt.

Some people on this forum have a negative view of Zend PHP exams but I think the Zend PHP 5.3 exam is worth it and definitely shows that you have the basics down.

However the 2 comments that I'd say without breaking NDA are -

1) It's not a memory exam - don't expect to read the prep book and pass - yes you do need to learn stuff but if you use PHP day in day out then you're good to go. When I did it I had 2.5 years of day in day out experience for my job and prepped for a month and still flunked first time. The questions test your understanding of PHP code and there are questions that WILL catch you out if you don't read them properly. A lot of them ask you to evaluate code and select the right result from the code given certain inputs. A good example of how they catch you out is knowing pass by reference and how if a variable is passed by reference this will effect the final result but if you misread it, it's easy to get wrong.

2) To contradict myself a little there is some memory work - you will need to read the certification book as a start and then read some study guides on the internet as they ask some questions about very obscure PHP functions which you won't use in daily job like IO streams. So you need to get those in your head along with stuff like array sorting functions and so on.

So yeah while the obscure stuff is a bit left field it tests your knowledge and understanding of the fundamentals of the language well and it's worthwhile having just don't try it if you're only a beginner.

-mrploddy